Archive for May, 2013

The media constellation has become increasingly fractured. The Web produced the initial fissure, but mobile created new cracks in the landscape. Today, no single medium earns more than 45% of our media consumption.

How can you solve this problem? Social media offers a solution.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are daily destinations for millions of consumers. Increasingly, their ad products offer targeting according to specific demographics, social connections, interests, and habits.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we analyze the state of social media advertising and where it is heading, offering a comprehensive guide and examination of the advertising ecosystems on Facebook and Twitter, offer a primer on Tumblr as an emerging ad medium, and detail how mobile is an important part of this story as mobile-friendly as native ad formats fuel growth in the market.

Not surprisingly, Facebook remains the overwhelming leader in photo sharing, with 350 million photos uploaded daily, or 64% of the daily total. But Facebook has 655 million daily active users or DAUs. Given that massive user base, it’s not surprising Facbook retains an edge, even though it isn’t exclusively a photo-oriented service.

iPads Account For More Than 80 Percent Of Tablet Use (Chitika)The iPad family accounted for 81% of tablet use in the U.S. and Canada during April, up slightly from a few months ago. Kindle Fires accounted for the second largest share, followed by Samsung Galaxy tablets.In other words, even though Androidtook its first lead in global tablet market share last quarter (see chart, right), that’s not showing up in North American usage patterns. It’s likely that Android tablets are filling out the low-end of the tablet market in the emerging world. Read >

We asked Simply Measured, a social media analytics company, to walk us through a test case, using its own Facebook page as an example.

Graph Search prioritizes engagement from fans. So you need to identify the posts that get most engagement. This chart looks at the number of posts made on the Page, and the number of audience reactions (“stories”) to them. The more reactions — likes, comments, etc. — the more likely a post is to show up in Graph Search.

“People Talking About This” measures any type of engagement from people who’ve liked your page. “Stories” are any type of post that would show up in a fan’s News Feed where it can be seen by their friends. (Stories need not be reactions to your posts.) The more fans (and friends of fans) who like a page’s content, the higher the ranking on Graph Search, and the easier it is to target your content more effectively.

Demographics give you an idea of who’s reading you. In this case, the marketer should favor content targeted at women in the Northwestern states. Simply Measured is based in Seattle, so this makes sense.

Two trends are converging that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform.

One is the rise of mobile, which means shoppers can price-compare and solicit advice from friends wherever they are. Another is the rise of the visual Web, with sites like Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and Wanelo becoming repositories for shopping ideas, fashion tips, and wish lists — in essence user-generated catalogs.

The last trend is demographic. Today’s mobile-savvy consumers in their teens and early twenties are accustomed to shopping online and tend to see their smartphones and tablets as their main computing device, and an important shopping tool.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.